Whether a Jewish wedding is white tie and tails at a five-star hotel, blue jeans and bare feet on a beach or something in between, today\’s betrothed couples are choosing to custom mix and match the components that come together to form a unique and perfect union.
Rabbi Deborah Bravo of Temple B\’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, N.J., went through plenty of placement interviews after her 1998 ordination as a Reform rabbi. Everywhere, she got the same question: not about her attitude toward homosexuality, not whether she wore a kippah and tallit, but whether she would officiate at an intermarriage. \”It has become the litmus test for placement,\” Bravo said in San Diego at last month\’s annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement\’s rabbinical association.
When you first learn that your child is — or might be — marrying someone who\’s not Jewish, you may not feel like celebrating. This can be a difficult and stressful occasion instead of the joyous one you had hoped for. To help you, here are a series of tips from people whose children have intermarried, as well as from outreach professionals and counselors.\n
Parents and pundits, you may breathe a sigh of relief. The Class of 2006 — or at least The Jewish Journal\’s not-so-random sampling of the class of 2006 — will put to rest any notion that this plugged in but wireless, overscheduled but doted upon and supersavvy but still so naive iPod generation is resting on a sense of inflated entitlement.
New Jew opened in 2002 at the Milken campus of The Jewish Federation/Valley Alliance, with 40 students in the ninth grade and Dr. Bruce Powell, veteran founder of successful Jewish high schools, at the helm. This year, 47 students who took the chance and dove head first into a new venture are graduating. The school was a risk that paid off.
When a book on bar mitzvah opens with a poem by Rudyard Kipling and a quote from French ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, it\’s clearly not your usual bar mitzvah book, of which there are many.
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